Title
Central and eastern chimpanzees are characterized by clinal genetic variation rather than a distant subspecies break (Meeting Abstract, The 84th Annual Meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists)
Author(s)
Funfstuck, T.;Arandjelovic, M.;Morgan, D.B.;Sanz, C.;Reed, P.;Olson, S.H.;Cameron, K.;Ondzie, A.;Peeters, M.;Vigilant, L
Published
2015
Publisher
American Journal of Physical Anthropology
Abstract
Geographically isolated populations of the same species are often called subspecies and expected to show some degree of genetic distinctiveness. Our closest living relatives, the common chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), are grouped into four such subspecies: the western (P.t.verus), the nigerian-cameroonian (P.t.ellioti), the central (P.t.troglodytes) and the eastern (P.t.schweinfurthii) chimpanzees. However, genetic studies have often relied upon samples of unknown geographic origin and have not consistently found that central and eastern chimpanzees form monophyletic clades. To examine whether the central and eastern subspecies form evolutionary distinct units, we analyzed data derived from noninvasive samples of wild individuals of known provenance. Specifically, we took 283 published eastern chimpanzee microsatellite genotypes from well-known communities and additionally generated genotypes from fecal samples from 185 central chimpanzees across wide parts of their range. Combined analysis of these datasets revealed a strong pattern of isolation by distance across both subspecies. Also, groups within the same subspecies were often genetically more distinct from each other than the least differentiated pair of groups taken from different subspecies. This proportion, however, became much smaller when we simulated a clumped sampling by including only groups that were geographically clustered. Our results are consistent with a close relationship between central and eastern chimpanzees and a possible joint taxon of equatorial chimpanzees. More generally, our results illustrate that conclusions about population structure depend highly on the distribution of the sampled individuals and emphasize the difficult nature of subspecies definitions.

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